Maybe you've seen one of the images on a postcard, or a print on the wall of a sentimental older relative: a person, usually a young child, gazes at you with a cartoonishly melancholy expression. She might be holding a puppy or a kitten, and she definitely has enormous, tearful eyes.

Ostensibly, they were created by Walter Keane, a playboy painter who sold millions of prints in the 1960s. In actuality, Margaret Keane—the wife Walter abused and stole from for nearly a decade—was the artist behind them. On Sunday, the Guardian published an extensive interview with Margaret, who never saw any of the money her talents brought in. Here, she describes the aftermath of a confrontation with her husband over the paintings' authorship:

"Back home he tried to explain it away," she says. "He said: 'We need the money. People are more likely to buy a painting if they think they're talking to the artist. People don't want to think I can't paint and need to have my wife paint. People already think I painted the big eyes and if I suddenly say it was you, it'll be confusing and people will start suing us.' He was telling me all these horrible problems."

Walter offered Margaret a solution: "Teach me how to paint the big-eyed children." So she tried. "And when he couldn't do it, it was my fault. 'You're not teaching me right. I could do it if you had more patience.' I was really trying, but it was just impossible."

Keane describes 16-hour days spent painting in locked, shuttered rooms as her husband carried on affairs and partied with the likes of the Beach Boys. She was prohibited from having any friends, and when she got a pet Chihuahua, she says, her husband beat and kicked it out of jealousy.

Eventually, Margaret Keane spoke up, divorced Walter, and was awarded $4 million after beating him in a live painting competition in a federal courtroom. Walter claimed he had a sore arm and couldn't work; Margaret painted her "big eyes" portrait in under an hour. (Sadly, Walter had squandered his fortune by that point, and Margaret didn't receive the payout.)

Margaret Keane's story—the courtroom paint-off in particular—sounds made for the movies, and indeed, Big Eyes, Tim Burton's biopic, comes out December 25.

[Image via Verbidoo]

In recent months, companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo have dialed back their most egregious political donations, pulling support from climate change-denying groups like ALEC and the Chamber of Commerce. But tech firms continue funneling money into right-wing campaigns, and the Silicon Valley liberals who financed them are pissed.

Politico reports that the anger stems from the tech industry's political naiveté. "When it comes to politics, Silicon Valley is a teenager that grew up too fast and doesn't understand the intricacies of the political system" the publication quoted Stanford's Vivek Wadhwa as saying.

While the teens play around in their fancy offices, the adults they hired in D.C. are playing the usual game of dirty politics:

"As some of these tech companies got large enough that they started opening D.C. offices, they brought in D.C. teams, which makes a lot of sense. And in a lot of ways, those D.C. teams did business as usual," said Julie Samuels, the executive director of Engine, which represents startup companies.

"But that way of typically operating on Capitol Hill doesn't always jibe with the ways these tech companies operate in the Bay Area or New York, wherever they're based," she continued. "So I actually think, in a lot of these cases, the companies' headquarters may not have realized everything that was going on in D.C."

Some of Silicon Valley's early forays into politics were compromised from the get go. FWD.us, Mark Zuckerberg's famously conflicted lobbying group, has "ground to a halt" and fired its president, according to National Journal. But that hasn't stopped the flow of corporate bucks into candidate's pockets.

Samuels argues that the tech industry has it harder because their political efforts are compared to their high-minded ideals:

"When you talk about companies like Facebook and Google, they are built on a more idealistic platform than a lot of major institutional companies historically have been," Samuels said. "It's part of their DNA that they engage on some of these social issues, that they engage their users. Politically, that puts them in a really tough spot. We don't hold other companies to the same standards."

Gee, I wonder where people got the idea that tech corporations are revolutionary.

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Photo: Shutterstock

Nicki Minaj released a new single today called "Only," and it's about how Drake and Lil Wayne actively want to fuck Nicki and how Nicki might one day let them fuck her, but honestly probably not. (Chris Brown, who sings the hook, does not get to fuck Nicki.) This concept is boring. We know Drake and Lil Wayne would fuck Nicki. Instead, we have a much more interesting question.

Would Drake and Lil Wayne fuck each other?

The answer, if we're being completely honest with ourselves, is probably not. But really, who's to say? Only Drake and Lil Wayne know for sure.

Drake and Lil Wayne have been on dozens of songs together in their careers, but not once have they addressed whether they would fuck each other. With both coming out and publicly stating that, yes, they very much would like to fuck Nicki Minaj, I think it's time they turned and addressed each other.

Would they? Would they not? If they were in a threesome with Nicki Minaj, would they touch each other? The people want to know. Or maybe they don't.

All slash fiction welcome in the comments.

[image via Getty]

Last week, GQ published a revealing new interview with the worst employee ever to darken the coastal New England-styled interior of Red Lobster: an old salt named Nicki Minaj.

The interview, conducted by GQ contributor Taffy Brodesser-Akner, is a notable document not just because Minaj finally elucidates the symbolism of the highly sexualized music video for her single "Anaconda"—"I knew that I wanted a gym theme"—or because she manages over the course of it to "doze off" four separate times.

It is also noteworthy because it contains the latest tantalizing snippet of the great founding myth of Nicki Minaj's life.

Throughout her conversations with Brodesser-Akner, Minaj comes across as a difficult interview—the succulent meat of her opinions, the red roe of her thoughts, the green tomalley of her soul, all guarded by an unbreakable rock-like carapace.

Except when she's talking about her wild youth at Red Lobster:

She was fired from a waitressing job at a Red Lobster after she followed a couple who had taken her pen into the parking lot and then flipped them the bird. I asked her if it was a special pen. "No," she said. "It was the principle."

An Annotated Oral History of Nicki Minaj's Employment by Red Lobster

Part One: The Pen

This month's GQ feature was not the first instance where Minaj shared a piece of lore from that time in her past when her financial well-being was dependent on the whims and gifts of the wine-dark sea. Indeed, it was not even the first time she shared the story of The Time Nicki Minaj Chased a Customer Out of Red Lobster For Taking a Pen. Rather, this anecdote bobs to the surface again and again, through seasons and across decades, washing ashore throughout Minaj's press tours, each time slightly different but sharing key core ideas, like the Flood Myth across Mesopotamian belief systems.

It is a story of self-reported antics that Nicki Minaj tells over and over in order to emphasize that these are exactly the types of antics one can expect from a Ms. Nicki Minaj.

In November of 2010, she told Billboard the pen thief was a woman.

"I worked at Red Lobster before that and I chased a customer out of the restaurant once so I could stick my middle finger up at her and demand that she give me my pen back. I swear to God I was bad."

A few months prior, to Vibe, it was a man, and she knocked on his car window after following him into the parking lot.

She was fired for following a customer into the parking lot, knocking on his car window and giving him the finger. "He stole my pen!" she says cackling. "I gave him the pen to sign the credit card slip, and I was gonna show him: I will lose my job for a pen. So I chased him into the freaking parking lot. Who does that?!"

Ten years on when Nicki Minaj relays her account of the incident, it is almost always with a heady Red Lobster Signature Cocktail-style blend of amusement and chagrin, as if Nicki Minaj cannot quite believe that a person would be so bold and wantonly aggressive as Nicki Minaj.

This, perhaps, is the reason a then-19-year-old Onika Maraj chased a customer out of Red Lobster to reclaim her pen: Not to reclaim her pen, but to have a story about the time she chased a customer out of Red Lobster to reclaim her pen.

But this anecdote—an anecdote in which a waitress chases you out of a Red Lobster, raps on your car window, and gives you the finger because you (perhaps unintentionally?) removed a check-signing pen from Red Lobster—is not the only indication that Nicki Minaj was a less than stellar employee.

Part Two: The Final Nail in the Salad

A former Red Lobsterman who spoke to Vibe for the same feature in 2010 shared a story about Minaj losing a nail in a salad.

One time, on an especially busy night, she was rushing to get some plates to a table and one of her super-long nails popped into a customer's salad.

"Our manager said 'Look at this, Onika. This is not good,'" recalls a former coworker. "And Onika goes, "Damn, I know! I can't believe I just broke my freaking nail!'"

Part Three: The Great Biscuit Bamboozle

What's more, by her own admission, Minaj was never particularly enthusiastic about her time spent on the crew of the #325 restaurant out of 1,074 in the Bronx, according to Trip Advisor.

Two years ago, in July of 2012, she complained to Jay Leno of customers' insatiable hunger for Red Lobster's signature Cheddar Bay Biscuits, provided gratis with the purchase of a meal—a purchase which, for many if not most customers, functions exclusively as a means of ensuring that Cheddar Bay Biscuits will be brought to a given table.

At the time Minaj was working at the Red Lobster on Bartow Avenue, Leno was already one of the wealthiest entertainers in America. And here she was, a mere ten years later, recounting the experience for him in lively detail.

"[Customers] always want too much bread. That's what bothered me. You guys, please, if you go to Red Lobster, stop ordering extra bread. You don't understand, because...We're so busy in the kitchen and it's like, the kitchen is hot, you're waiting for your orders, and you have another table, and blahblahblah. And you go to the table and you're thinking it's a big emergency and they're like: 'Can we have some more bread?''

"I didn't want to be there, and the customers could tell," Minaj added. Her earring fell out during the interview.

But perhaps Minaj abhorred those eager customers because their glassy, greedy eyes formed a mirror reflecting back her own intemperance. In 2013, Minaj revealed to Marie Claire that she, too, was a fan of the chief export of Cheddar Bay. When asked during a fan-led Q&A to describe her favorite memory from her time at Red Lobster, Minaj answered:

"Eating all the bread."

Part Four: Cheddar Bay Chicanery

It should come as no surprise, particularly to those who are familiar with Minaj in her current career as a rapper, that Nicki Minaj no longer works at Red Lobster. She was fired. The circumstances and volume of her firings, though, will come as a shock to many.

Nicki Minaj has been fired by more Red Lobsters than most people will ever visit.

In 2010 Nicki Minaj was a guest on Atlanta's Hot 109.7 "Rickey Smiley Morning Show!" While in the studio, she discussed her smash-hit debut studio album "Pink Friday," and also Red Lobster.

After explaining to listeners that her stint at Red Lobster occurred during era of legendary strife with the servers of a nearby Applebee's ("...[W]e did kind of have like Applebee's-Red Lobster beef, like back in the day. It was like the Applebee's waitresses thought they was better because they had a newer establishment."), Minaj dropped a bombshell: For a time, her life essentially consisted of getting fired and rehired by various Red Lobster franchises across the New York metropolitan area:

"...I got fired from, like, five different Red Lobsters. I got fired from, like, every Red Lobster you could think of: The Bronx, Long Island, Queens, everywhere. I don't know why, but they thought I had [an] attitude."

Why was Nicki Minaj allowed to continue sowing seeds of chaos across the greater New York City area (Red Lobsters), without intervention from the restaurant, or its former parent company, Darden Restaurants, Inc.?

Because she deceived them.

"But what was so crazy is that [in order to get hired] you had to lie and say you had never worked at Red Lobster before. And I swear to God I'm not trying to be funny. So I used to lie on the applications until they would find me out. People would notice me and then they would go and tell the manager. I had haters back then. I've had haters since Red Lobster."

Of course, we all have our own reasons for wanting to work at Red Lobster. Perhaps Nicki Minaj continued applying to franchises across New York, rather than taking her considerable experience to another casual dining chain, because Red Lobster was a place where she already (to borrow a nautical phrase) "knew the ropes." I've never seen anyone communicate their passion for the sea to customers so efficiently, her shift supervisors would say, unaware that they had just welcomed aboard Chaos incarnate, in regulation non-slip close-toed shoes.

Perhaps she simply wanted to prove to herself that she could work at Red Lobster without getting fired. (A hypothesis that would ultimately prove incorrect.) We have already established her complicated relationship with the Cheddar Bay biscuits.

The Moral of the Story

Whatever the reason, it seems clear that—assuming we can extrapolate future behavior from past—Nicki Minaj will apply for employment at New York area Red Lobsters many more times before she is rendered unable by the incapacitation of old age or death.

As these anecdotes indicate, to hire this candidate would be a mistake.

Therefore, Gawker must decline to provide an official endorsement of Nicki Minaj for the position of server at Red Lobster at this time.

[Photos via Getty, Wikipedia]

A Philadelphia police officer will face disciplinary action after he was caught on video threatening to "beat the shit out of" a teenage boy for "looking him in his fucking eye."

NBC Philly reports the teens in the video were walking home when the unnamed 19th District officer confronted one of them. Neither the police department nor Damaris Abercrombie, who posted the video to Facebook, has commented on what led to the altercation.

The footage has been seen more than 100,000 times on Facebook alone. It's been shared nearly 5,000 times.

"The video does not reflect well on the officer," an anonymous police official told NBC, "I have no doubt he had good reason to be exasperated but you have to maintain your professional demeanor."

[H/T Daily Dot, Video via Damaris Abercrombie/Facebook]

If jihad doesn't work out, the Islamic State probably has a future in public relations.

40. "Dark"

39. "Darker"

38. "Barbarism"

37. "Very engaging"

36. "Sophisticated marketing"

35. "Powerful"

34. "Brutality"

33. "More brutal than most"

32. "Brutally violent"

31. "Brutally effective"

30. "Brutal but effective"

29. "Shocking in its cruelty and brutality"

28. "Extreme even for the most brutal militants"

27. "Direct and aggressive"

26. "Sophisticated"

25. "High-quality"

24. "High production-value"

23. "Strikingly high production quality"

22. "High production values and 'a strong sense of narrative'"

21. "Well-funded, well-organized"

20. "Well-organized"

19. "Calculated"

18. "Robust"

17. "Relentlessly graphic"

16. "Shot in crystal-clear high definition"

15. "Slick high-definition"

14. "Slick"

13. "Slick"

12. "Slick"

11. "Slick"

10. "Slicker"

9. "Very slick"

8. "Slickly produced"

7. "Slickly produced"

6. "Slickly produced"

5. "Slickly produced"

4. "Slickly produced"

3. "As usual, slickly produced"

2. "Really slick and sophisticated"

TIE-1. "Slick... ominous"

TIE-1. "Slick—so slick"

William Clemons, the highest-ranking uniformed officer of New York City's Correction Department, will resign, it was announced today, because—well, because Rikers Island is a really, truly, unimaginably awful place.

Clemons' "retirement" comes after reports that violence regularly went unreported in the jail's juvenile facility, that guards brutally beat mentally ill inmates, that violence among guards often goes unpunished, and that healthcare in the jail ranges from "substandard" to "nonexistent."

The chief, who was appointed to his current position in May after a 29-year tenure in the department, has been the target of criticism regarding the failings of the juvenile facility in particular, where he previously served as warden. As the Times notes, a 2011 internal audit recommended that Clemons be demoted, citing his abdication of "all responsibility" in the underreporting of fights. According to Gothamist, Clemons neglected that responsibility because he found the required Excel spreadsheets "too difficult to read" and couldn't figure out how to print them. He was promoted anyway.

Joseph Ponte, the Correction Department commissioner who appointed Clemons, called him an "able leader" and "model of stability" in a statement released about the resignation today.

In a joint statement, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Vivierto and Councilmember Elizabeth Crowley made their disagreement clear. From Gothamist:

"We thank U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara for spearheading investigations and urge Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Ponte to appoint new leadership that will commit to implementing transparent and humane policies that will keep the public safe, maintain the dignity of the City's jailed population and resolve long-standing allegations of abuse and neglect at Rikers Island."

[Image via New York City Department of Correction]

Damn. High school was hard. Remember having to do math every day? Remember this monolith?

Yeah. The fuckin' TI-83. That shit took up, like, half your backpack! And what if your water bottle spilled on it? Your mom was gonna be so angry. My calc had a sweet translucent green cover, even though I had to take algebra twice so never really graphed anything.

Yeahhhhhh. If you were good at math, you got to use this sweet baby. The TI-83 *plus*. See those rounded buttons? Only for the hands of the mathematically gifted. Sine, cosine. Let's make magic, princess.

Oh shit. Who thought of making it clear? WHICH VP AT TEXAS INSTRUMENTS THOUGHT OF MAKING IT CLEAR? Fucking beautiful machine. Give them a raise. If I could go back in time and hold this calculator in my hands, I would get someone smart to code so many nice cheats into it, and I would pass trigonometry for arts majors.

A pink model, for girls :).

This is the TI-89 Titanium. I guess this is what kids use nowadays. Is that a stock ticker on there? Millennials. Well, math is important, so keep on doing it!

To catch a 15-year-old accused of sending bomb threats to a local high school, the FBI emailed the teen a fake Seattle Times article on a counterfeit Seattle Times website that linked to location-tracking malware, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

From the Seattle Times:

The EFF documents reveal that the FBI dummied up a story with an Associated Press byline about the Thurston County bomb threats with an email link "in the style of The Seattle Times," including details about subscriber and advertiser information.

The link was sent to the suspect's MySpace account. When the suspect clicked on the link, the hidden FBI software sent his location and Internet Protocol information to the agents. A juvenile suspect was identified and arrested June 14.

As you would expect, the Seattle Times is furious about the FBI's misrepresentation of the paper.

"We are outraged that the FBI, with the apparent assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office, misappropriated the name of The Seattle Times to secretly install spyware on the computer of a crime suspect," Seattle Times Editor Kathy Best said in a statement. "Not only does that cross a line, it erases it."

From Best's statement:

Our reputation and our ability to do our job as a government watchdog are based on trust. Nothing is more fundamental to that trust than our independence — from law enforcement, from government, from corporations and from all other special interests. The FBI's actions, taken without our knowledge, traded on our reputation and put it at peril."

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., described the FBI's tactic as "outrageous."

"The ends don't justify the means," he told The Stranger. "I'm not saying that the FBI shouldn't be investigating people who threaten to bomb schools. But impersonating the media is a really dangerous line to cross.

The FBI, for their part, defended the decision, smarmily invoking the recent school shootings in Marysville and Seattle.

"Every effort we made in this investigation had the goal of preventing a tragic event like what happened at Marysville and Seattle Pacific University," Frank Montoya Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI in Seattle, told the Seattle Times. "We identified a specific subject of an investigation and used a technique that we deemed would be effective in preventing a possible act of violence in a school setting. Use of that type of technique happens in very rare circumstances and only when there is sufficient reason to believe it could be successful in resolving a threat."

The 15-year-old was convicted of sending bomb threats to a high school near Olympia and sentenced to 90 days in juvenile detention. He was also ordered to pay $8,852 in compensation to the school and barred from using computers, video games, or cell phones for two years, according to Ars Technica.

[ Image via The Stranger]

On Monday morning, I woke up to a Facebook post by Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi defending his so-called BDSM sex. As an experienced kinkster and professional dominatrix, I was deeply offended by his apology. For years Ghomeshi has hosted a popular CBC show, Q, and has had a prominent role as a cultural gatekeeper in the Canadian arts. According to reports from the Toronto Star and elsewhere, Ghomeshi has long had a pattern of creepy and abusive behaviour; when a writer published a thinly veiled report of his behaviour on xoJane, she was attacked online by hordes of his supporters. Multiple reports corroborate his tendency to hit and degrade women without their consent, but these women, some of whom have spoken to Canadian news outlets anonymously, have been afraid to be named lest they too are harassed online.

On the surface, some of Ghomeshi's activities may resemble forms of BDSM. I am an experienced kinkster and professional dominatrix, and one of the most intense and powerful types of kinky play that I practice doesn't involve a lot of ropes, cuffs, chains or other toys. It doesn't involve the formality of a planned kinky scene with a clear beginning and a definite end. It's just rough and raw: it's the thrill of grabbing your partner, manhandling them, shoving them around, slapping them, bending them to your will. I have a hunger for this type of play. It has an unfiltered, primal power to it, and I love it. It arouses every part of me. The edgy, dangerous, unscripted feel of it electrifies me.

But what I know, after a lifetime of studying BDSM, is that this type of play is impossible to perform safely and ethically without the most stringent and deeply understood mutual consent. I won't do it with just anyone I pick up at a show or find on the Internet. Along with most ethical kinksters, I always start a new partner—even one who is champing at the bit—off with deliberate, slow, and limited forms of BDSM play. Every toy, every humiliating phrase, and every aspect of the tempo and intensity of the scene are negotiated carefully in advance. I wouldn't role-play a scene involving force or reluctance on anyone whose reactions I didn't know like the back of my hand. And when I do play that way, I'm not only listening for safe words: I'm reading the reactions of my partner, continually looking for their arousal, for that light in their eyes that tells me that they're on board. I am looking for adverse reactions, too, and I check in if I see or hear signs of a panic attack or dissociation, like a change in breathing pace, voice tone, or the size of pupils.

If anyone ever reacted to me the way Ghomeshi's victims reportedly responded to him, with signs of obvious reluctance and disgust, I would stop, instantly.

Maybe Ghomeshi is telling the truth and has respected the consent of his partners, but I don't buy it. The xoJane piece and the anonymous reports from his other victims seem of a type. They tend to paint Ghomeshi as an abuser, not a kinkster. Real kinksters have a healthy fear of the devastating consequences of violating consent. If I fancy someone, I won't lay a finger upon them until I am convinced of their eagerness. Unlike Ghomeshi, I do not slake my thirst for domination and control upon unwilling and clearly protesting people.

Last Sunday, Ghomeshi was sacked from his job at the CBC. With the help of crisis management firm Navigator, he took to his Facebook, shielding his image by writing that lengthy, impassioned post that claimed that everything he did with the accusing women is consensual BDSM. In the post he makes valid points; kinksters do have a right to to a private life and employers should stay out of people's sex lives. But while his behavior may resemble BDSM, it is missing the magic ingredient of consent, and that makes it disgusting abuse, not kink. Ghomeshi invokes civil liberties, but he is only trying to save his own ass. The CBC should be applauded for its decision, not condemned as an agent of moral reaction.

Ghomeshi claims that his former partners sent him texts that prove their consent. I'm skeptical of this. Texts sent as part of an ongoing role play of dominance and submission do not imply consent to the physical and emotional violations he perpetrated. Consent can always be withdrawn, and even if some of Ghomeshi's partners were initially willing, the reports trickling out indicate that, at the very least, he didn't respect such withdrawals.

(And sadly, the existence of those disputed texts could partially explain why more victims haven't spoken out on the record; for many people involved in kink, the risks of being outed as a kinkster, from job loss to child custody denied, mean that when the line is crossed into abuse, they remain silent for fear of being outed.)

Kinksters have spent years patiently explaining the difference between kink and abuse to the media. It's not just an abstract point. Abuse or BDSM can look the same if you only consider the shrieking, writhing person being restrained, beaten and shagged silly. It has taken a monumental effort by kink activists to convince media to observe the careful, patient negotiation that happens before that moment, in a consensual kinky scene—and Ghomeshi's current press strategy seeks to take advantage of the knowledge gap that still remains. Poor understanding of BDSM gives abusers a green light for their abuse, and tricks vulnerable people into dangerous, violating situations. In calling his behavior legitimate kink, Ghomeshi stands to undo all of our hard work, and by spinning himself as a victim, he is using the name of a good cause to distract from serious, repeated claims of abuse.

Thousands are already swallowing the bait. Responses to Ghomeshi's Facebook post are overwhelmingly positive, and some kinksters are reflexively rallying to his cause. But defending Ghomeshi will not do anything to further a productive conversation around kink. It will only foment further public confusion, and arm those who use aspects of BDSM to strengthen and promote rape culture. If he thinks he is going to use the BDSM community as a cover for his abuse, he has another thing coming.

I have written before that this era is a crossroads for kink awareness. As part of the worldwide fightback against rape culture, greater understanding of consent has made a space for those who practice consensual kink to build awareness and gain respect. With his defense, Ghomeshi could wipe out the many years of patience and hard work by kinksters. Let's switch his microphone off.

Margaret Corvid is a writer, activist and professional dominatrix living in the South West of England. She blogs regularly at the New Statesman and has appeared recently in The Guardian, xoJane and The Frisky. More of her work can be found at Sordid.org.uk.

Image by Jim Cooke, photo by Getty.

The latest estimates of American life expectancy are out, and we're doing great! Living longer than ever. But—ooo—I hate to ask you this, but maybe, could you not do that, and instead die younger? We have these pension issues, see...

The Wall Street Journal notes that even as new retirees celebrate the prospect of being able to sit their decrepit asses on the sofa eating sodium-free peas until the average age of 89 (women) or 87 (men), there is a drawback: those extra years on earth will be an added cost burden to their pensions. Which are probably already broke as hell!

The new estimates released Monday—based on data from corporate pension plans—could eventually increase retirement liabilities by roughly 7% for most corporate plans, according to Aon Hewitt....

Corporations have roughly $3 trillion in current retirement liabilities.

We must allow corporate pension funds to euthanize the elderly as it become fiscally prudent to do so. Responsible financial planning starts now.

[Photo: Flickr]

Radar Online has obtained the police report detailing the charges against Mark McDaniel—the convicted child molester who was recently reunited with Honey Boo Boo matriarch Mama June after spending a decade in jail for molesting her then-eight-year-old daughter Anna Cardwell. It's horrifying.

The incident report was filed in 2003 with the Spalding County Sheriff's department after Anna told a teacher that McDaniel was molesting her. He later pled guilty to aggravated child molestation and spent 10 years in jail.

Radar didn't publish the "exact nature of [McDaniel's] assaults" on Anna, but the details provided are enough.

According to the report, "Anna ... stated that Mark touches her private parts and sometimes he makes her touch his. Anna advised she tells Mark to stop, but he keeps going." Anna told a police officer and a child services counselor that "she had done the 's word' with Mark." The report states that McDaniel molested her multiple times between April and October of 2002.

When McDaniel was indicted in 2003, grand jurors accused him of "play[ing] videos depicting sexual acts for Anna Marie Shannon, fond[ling] the vagina of Anna Marie Shannon, ejaculating on the person of Anna Marie Shannon," and forcing oral sex on her.

Radar has partial scans of the report here.

Anna, now a 20-year-old mom herself, told People yesterday that Mama June didn't believe her at first when she spoke up about McDaniel's abuse:

A week or so after it happened, I talked to Mama and she was upset, crying and saying, "I don't believe you, I don't believe you, why would you do this to me?" And I was like, "Mama, he did that to me and I can't do anything about it. You were never there to see it. You were always at work."

Mama June, McDaniel, and Mama June's nine-year-old daughter Honey Boo Boo were photographed together last month.

[Photo via Getty]

Spoilers ahead.

There’s a moment in “About a Boy,” the fifth episode of Homeland’s fourth and current season, that clarifies what the show is trying to do. We see C.I.A. agent Carrie Mathison and Aayan Ibrahim, the Pakistani college student she’s trying to recruit, lying in bed when Mathison begins to cry. For the audience it’s a clear callback to Mathison’s botched recruitment of Nicholas Brody in the first season, when they sleep together in a secluded cabin (where Carrie witnesses Brody’s disturbing recollections in close proximity). For Mathison, however, it’s only a long-buried grief; for Ibrahim, a brief flicker of confusion. And then the moment passes.

Homeland has become a show that constantly moves forward, whose cast is aware of the past but never too concerned with it. With Brody gone, Homeland no longer leans so heavily on flashback sequences, which accustomed the audience, in the earlier seasons, to the Marine’s captivity in Damascus. In the absence of that sort of reflection or exposition, the show’s characters are allowed to barrel forward, for better or worse, into the unknown.

The season’s fifth chapter, which aired on Sunday night, indulged this new freedom toward the end. One of the three main storylines, involving the violent death of C.I.A. chief Sandy Bachman, takes a radical turn when former C.I.A. director Saul Berenson, played by Mandy Patinkin, is captured after he follows a suspect named Farhad Ghazi through an airport terminal in Islamabad. It turns out to be a trap: one of Ghazi’s associates takes out Berenson easily with a syringe. Ghazi and his men eventually remove the incapacitated C.I.A. chief from the airport in a wheelchair. No tradecraft necessary.

We’ve seen other C.I.A. directors murdered—remember the car bomb at the end of season two?—but never compromised or captured, in America or abroad. And never in full daylight. This feels like a much bigger deal than portrayed.

The first two thirds of the episode were a different story: a lot of movement, but not a lot of actual progress or conflict. The two other main storylines, the faked death of Ibrahim's uncle, and the shady dealings of the U.S. ambassador's husband, struggled to gain new ground. Ibrahim is still staying with Carrie; his uncle is still at large (although Ibrahim finally confirms that fact to Carrie); and the ambassador's husband, played by Mark Moses, is still mostly powerless to both his wife and the Pakistani intelligence officer who’s trying to turn him.

Then again, I might be overstating both this episode’s novelty and this season’s momentum. The most recent chapter, after all, begins as it ends: With Mathison and Ibrahim embracing, the former still trying to recruit Ibrahim, the latter still holding the impossible belief that Mathison, posing as a journalist, has his best interests at heart.

The booming size of today's mainstream social networks and the constant level of noise we have to deal with has inspired a sudden return to a time when the internet was quieter, safer, and more intimate: the Web 1.0 days. Like artisanal hipster nostalgia for a time when men were men, shoes were handmade, and everyone pickled their own vegetables, the internet's vanguard is pushing for a return toward a simpler digital era.

We're tired of being told what to do, what to see, and how to interact online by platforms that resemble rat mazes more than sandboxes. We're nostalgic for the close-knit, DIY nature of the early web, where everything was smaller, from the communities to the design itself.

So why not replicate this experience today? That's the attempt being made by a handful of new sites and platforms, like the promised ad-free social network Ello, the lo-fi Tilde.club, and most recently, Facebook's new retro forums app, Rooms.

Nostalgic for intimacy

When it first got popular, Facebook was like the back room at a club: A cozy space filled with just your friends, everyone clearly connected to everyone else. Now, it's more like a stadium, with thousands of voices competing to be heard on every activity feed. Brands and strangers clamor for attention alongside people you might actually know, and it's getting harder to connect with the people you really want to reach.

But the web doesn't have to be so big.

Ello grew from a niche social network full of graphic designers into a viral phenomenon, in large part due to its anti-Facebook branding. The new site not only says it will never sell an ad, it also promises to never harvest any user data, a double-hitter that consciously denies all the ways social networks have actually been making money. Web 2.0 meant being big, efficient, and monetized, and now the newcomer is riding the backlash.

Image: Ello

Facebook's own Rooms app similarly promises to recreate the lost sense of online intimacy, by giving users single-purpose spaces to discuss their passions (beat-boxing is already popular) pseudonymously. Even the social media behemoth itself seems to have realized that it's too big to handle on a daily basis.

In fact, Rooms developer Josh Miller even consulted with the founders of Web 1.0 communities like Metafilter to create the new app. We can trace a line from those early message platforms, like Usenet and IRC chats, directly to the more recent explosion of group chat apps like GroupMe and Slack that give us unmediated digital spaces in which to gather. The new wave of social networking is all about rediscovering who your real friends are.

Nostalgic for free-form self-expression

Niche communities that aren't overseen by giant companies also have the freedom to evolve on their own and embrace identities and designs that wouldn't be possible on Facebook. For the currently in-vogue Tilde.club, that means a nostalgic first-generation HTML aesthetic that its users manage to make look avant-garde instead of silly, like a couture fashion label suddenly embracing fleece.

Paul Ford, a writer, editor, and programmer, launched Tilde as "a pure lark," he later wrote on Medium. Its name is a reference to the symbols that designated the pages of separate users on social websites in the 90s. Similarly, the new site allows its users to create their own homepages with the basic tool of a command line.

Tilde's user sites are examples of free-form self-expression that feel rare in the Facebook era. Awl proprietor Choire Sicha is using it to blog about his gym visits. New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham hosts status updates made of vibrant animated text. These are things you might not want to share with all your followers.

Images: Tilde.club

Because Tilde's content isn't as open to the internet at large, it's easier to be earnest. "People have more fun when they can be vulnerable and open," Ford explained to me in an email. Especially when they "aren't bracing themselves for a bunch of shrieking assholes to violently weigh in on every possible thing in order to score more virtual rage points." The appeal of a tighter content ecosystem is clear when any public tweet might be singled out by an internet terror machine like Gamergate.

Spam may have been a latent threat in the Web 1.0 era, but the prevalence of anonymity and the simple nature of social networks made it feel generally harmless. The loss of online privacy has become a much more imminent danger as of late. The internet is now a much more public place where anything that gets written has a tendency to fall into the wrong hands almost immediately. Threats of hate-group trolling and hacking make a return to a safer time even more appealing. Facebook, Twitter, and Ello don't do enough to protect their users, but smaller social networks can self-police.

Tilde isn't even really a social network, and it's particularly difficult to make your own version, Ford pointed out. It's "a shared Unix computer on the internet. You could boot up a new Tilde.Club on any Mac," he wrote. The site is more of a web-hosting service in the mold of Web 1.0 darlings like Geocities, Tripod, or Angelfire, which have also been coming back into fashion—see the name-checking throwback Neocities, where users can build simple websites with the help of code tutorials.

Images: Neocities

But requiring even minimal skills or a personal invite keeps niche communities semi-exclusive. Tilde is invitation only; the majority of its active users are part of a smallish media-focused social circle highly active on Twitter, where invitations were first distributed. Tilde currently has a wait list of 7,000, according to New York Magazine, due in part, I would bet, to the cachet of the experiment's participants. But that we would fight over the chance to the digital real-estate in which to build a low-functioning personal site speaks to the depth of this nostalgia.

Nostalgic for minimalism

By moving back toward the early web, we're also recapturing an ability to actively reshape the internet around us, something that we've lost over the past decade. Like Tilde, the internet used to have a higher barrier to entry than what we're used to today, and not just socially—you had to know some fundamentals of coding to join in.

"I love that I'm getting requests from my non-programmer 20-something friends asking how to use SSH," said Rusty Foster, who founded the collaborative website Kuro5hin in 1999. Though Tilde's anachronistic interface became unnecessary by the late 90s with the rise of Netscape, it still feels fresh to Foster. "The basic things you need to know to use Tilde.club are still the tools that people who build the internet use every day," he said.

Beyond a community of pages, Tilde is also a chance to look under the hood of the internet in a way Facebook intentionally doesn't allow us to. "It was natural that these platforms distanced us from the simple workings of the web," said Brett O'Connor, who co-founded Put HTML, a minimalist service that allows users to host one megabyte of HTML code to link back to or embed elsewhere (this one is a favorite).

Image: Put HTML

Both Tilde and Put HTML encourage us to play with the boundaries of internet aesthetics rather than work within them. Put HTML "liberated us from some of the current conventions of social media and content," O'Connor said. If you've ever been nostalgic for the screen-filling tiled GIFs of old-school YTMND, now's your chance to bring it all back.

Image: YTMND

This shift could be found years ago in the work of internet-focused artists like Computers Club,Olia Lialina, and the duo JODI, whose fractured-HTML homepage remains a monument to Web 1.0. In part it may be occurring because the internet changes so quickly that we're unable to take stock of it in the moment. "The old web came and went so fast, and I think many of us are wondering what may have been left behind," O'Connor said. "There is a form of archaeology happening."

Image: JODI

That archaeology is made literal in Lialina's project with Dragan Espenschied, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. The Tumblr trawls the archive made of Geocities before it was taken down by Yahoo and displays screenshots of random websites once hosted on the platform, providing a perfect reference guide for Tilde users looking to faithfully replicate the past.

Images: Terabyte archive

Nostalgia isn't a perfect answer

If nostalgia follows a 20-year cycle, then this trend is also perfectly timed for a larger wave of yearning for the 90s. Communication online during that time was a potent experience—connecting with friends in distant places by email or AIM and chatting late into the night were brand new possibilities. By now, however, these experiences are mundane. We do the same thing thousands of times a day, for work and for fun, intentionally and passively. The Web 1.0 revival tries to recapture that initial rush.

But returning to online cliques isn't a perfect answer. Foster learned as much with Kuro5hin. "Managing an online community is the most difficult thing I've ever tried to do," he said. "The hardest part is that eventually you face the need to exclude someone." And if you don't, you risk running into the same problems facing the mainstream internet today. The decisions on who to allow in "get made by default in favor of the loudest and most aggressive members, and eventually that's all your community consists of," Foster said.

Nostalgia could get in the way of taking advantage of the valuable aspects of the internet we've built over the past two decades. There's an upside to our huge social networks. Facebook and Twitter allow for sharing on a massive scale, helping to break news and propel revolutions. They have also enabled more people to connect online than ever before, no skills, experience, or special equipment needed.

It's not a bad thing that the web has become democratized. It creates room for many spaces of all different sizes. Tight, Web 1.0-style communities gain in intimacy but they lose in creating open dialogue because they are limited by necessity. Whether it's by intention, absence of invitations, or lack of an opportunity to learn basic coding, some users are left out, and we might end up regretting it.

Sam Rubin, one of the morning anchors at KTLA 5 in Los Angeles, was in the middle of a self-deprecating story about the time his wife asked him, "When did you become the fat one on that show?" when a reporter had to cut in to deliver a breaking totally sick burn.

"He's always been!" Ginger Chan blurted from the traffic center, not realizing her mic was still on. The live broadcast cut to Chan's shocked face as it dawned on her that Rubin, their coworkers, and a whole bunch of viewers had just heard her developing story about that dude having been fat forever.

Rubin, who is in stable condition and expected to make a full recovery, wrote on his Facebook page that the whole thing was a"very honest; and very funny moment." The two hugged it out, and Rubin wrote a thinkpiece about the whole thing for Medium.

[h/t Mirror]

When it was launched it looked like nothing else. Its pizza slice-like design made it one of the most stable ships for its size and it has since spawned a whole new class of crazy looking vessels. Yet this clandestine spy ship is most notorious in Russia, whose military absolutely detests its existence.

Meet Norway's Marjata, one of the most advanced spy ships in the world.

Launched in 1992, the 7,560 ton displacement Marjata, the third Norwegian spy ship to carry that name, has a pretty tough primary mission- to chase around and shadow the Russian Navy's incredibly powerful, Barents and Norwegian Sea based Northern Fleet, through some of the most challenging sea conditions in the world.

Her unique 'Ramform' hull was a revelation of sorts in the maritime design world when she was launched. The design is not only an incredibly stable one, which helps when your mission includes packing around delicate listening sensors and ELINT surveillance gear, but it also allows for generous interior volume and it can stay afloat in heavy seas with large portions of its hull well under the waterline. In addition, cargo shifting and exact trimming is much less critical with a Ramform hull design than it is with traditional hull configurations. The ship's wedge shape design also allows for very quiet operation, which is important for monitoring the underwater activities of potentially unfriendly navies.

Marjata was designed for efficient operation and carries a crew of about 14 sailors along with 30 intelligence specialists, although her complement can change drastically depending on the mission and surveillance technologies installed aboard. The ship also has a large helicopter pad which can facilitate the switching out of crews during long duration missions.

Based normally in Kirkenes, Marjata is most active when the Russian Northern Fleet is as well, constantly shadowing them during large exercises. According to one Russian naval website, the Marjata and her similarly named Norwegian predecessors is so commonly visible during Russian North Sea and arctic naval maneuvers that it has a common nickname, "Masha," and some Russians speculate it is actually crewed by Americans (rough translation):

Probably not in the North is there a ship's officer who would not know who this "Marjata" is. Many old-timers will remember the one old "Masha." Marjata NATO military for many years used the research vessel "Marjata" to monitor military activities , gathering intelligence and military information in the North.

Most of the year the ship is in international waters. Crew of "Marjata" is only American personnel . Rare out ships to perform combat training complete without meeting with this lady. Often it comes in the closed areas and interfere with combat exercises, recording parameters of our stations and radio...

The writer also claims that Russia would commonly do whatever they could short of full on attacking the Marjata to get rid of her:

...The Northern Fleet patrol drove "Masha" from the target position by shooting her in the stern of the RBU and the AK-726. Also fresh in the memory of a respected team of naval commander, given in almost similar circumstances: "The rocket salvo across the island! Island - "Marjata"! "

Nowhere has the presence of the Marjata made more news in these post Cold War times than during the tragic series of events that occurred on August 12th, 2000. On that morning the Russian nuclear cruise missile attack submarine Kursk K-141 was participating in the largest naval exercises since the fall of the Soviet Union and was about to fire a pair of inert torpedoes when she blew up and sank sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea. Marjata, in her usual fashion, was very nearby monitoring the live-fire drills and as a result she observed the tragic and terribly embarrassing events first hand, something the Russians were far from excited about. The whole ordeal, including the Marjata's part in it, are well presented in this moment-by-moment account featured in The Guardian.

Since the invasion of Crimea last winter, and Russia's subsequently much more provocative military stance on the world stage, western intelligence agencies have been scrambling to keep an eye on what seems like an endless series of land warfare drills, naval exercises, and air combat training events.

The countries along Russia's western border with Europe, and namely near where Russia's bluntly powerful Northern Fleet is based, have been especially busy trying to keep up with and ascertain Russia's mutating geopolitical and military aims. This has been made even more important as a result of Russia's growing intent to lay claim to vast oil and natural gas deposits in the arctic, thus it is quite likely that Marjata has been busier than ever. Some relief coming soon in the form of at least a partial replacement for her, the much larger, although traditionally hulled, the 440 foot Marjata IV.

The hull of what is said to be Norway's next Marjata spy ship:

This new giant intelligence ship was ordered in 2010 and was built in Romania. She was towed through the Bosphorus to Norway last March and is currently being outfitted for her operational debut in 2016. It is said that once finished the ship will be the most advanced intelligence ship in the world and there are some rumors that it may play some role in the US missile defense apparatus as well.

Since her commissioning twenty years ago, other and much more extreme Ramform hull designs have come online, with the format being particularly suited for seismic and other geological survey ships. One of the most incredible and luxurious 'working ships' in the world is a Ramform design, known as the Ramform Titan Class.

The Ramform Titan, operated by Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) is a 3-D seismic mapping, research and exploration vessel, but it has some of the creature comforts of a cruise ship. These include a pool deck, a lecture hall, lounge with with sweeping bow views, central grand staircase and an incredibly gymnasium among other comforts. Her wedge shape and super-wide stern allow for 24 tow points and winches for deploying and towing sensors, as well as easily launching and recovering slips for up to four small fast boats.

Although the Ramform Titan and her identical sister ship Ramform Atlas are the most impressive of the Ramform hull designs, there are others of various sizes with PGS operating nine of the types. The company is also on record saying that the Titan Class will be made up of at least four vessels, with two already having been delivered.

PGS's Ramform fleet are the most capable seismic survey ships in the world, and that capability owes a lot to the Marjata's pioneering design. Still, Ramform hulls are an up and coming configuration for yachts and naval vessels as well.

For the yachting world the design makes perfect sense. It is one of the most stable designs ever conceived. It offers generous internal volumes and wide cross-sections, something that can really open up a designer's creativity. Additionally, the Ramform layout allows for much larger stern, where more and more important features on yachts are located, like the ability to store more tenders and toys, as well as creating a large and wide "steel beach" for passengers to enjoy.

Because of the ship's large footprint but high efficiency, large helicopter pads and aviation hangars no longer have to detract from other potential luxury features, as there is plenty of 'surface area' to go around. Worldwide luxury icon Hermes and artsy contemporary ship builder Wally Yachts have already concepted a minimalist Ramform yacht design, and it was incredibly well received by the yachting world.

On the military end of things, Ramform hull designs could allow naval designers to also rethink space management, and even mission capabilities of traditional classes of ships.

For certain missions where high-speed is not a major factor, Ramfrom designs could provide much more interior volume, deck and stern space than traditional 'linear' combat ship designs. This could be incredibly useful for a dedicated missile defense ship, that really doesn't have to travel fast but has to stay on station for a very long period of time. They also need a lot of deck space to accommodate potentially hundreds of vertical launch cells for missile interceptors.

Seeing as naval persistence and sea basing is becoming a major priority for the United States Navy, Special Operations Command and Marines, the Ramform's large deck and interior space makes a lot of sense to fulfill such a mission. Similar to how the USS Ponce is serving as a mobile sea base right now for special operations and mine sweeping in the Persian Gulf.

USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf:

A Ramform hull ship would be much more capable of such a mission, with its large deck providing space for heavy mine-hunting helicopters like the MH-53 Sea Dragon, and its wide stern being able to house, launch and recover literally dozens of small boats, even while the ship is underway. These small boats don't even have to be manned as a Ramform configured ship could launch and recover a armada of unmanned small boats to provide offensive and defensive swarm capabilities like no other vessel could. Fuel for both aviation and surface warfare assets could be stored in mass in a Ramform hull's vast interior keel space.

As Marjata's time as one of NATO's most important spy ships ticks down, her legacy is a strong one. Being a springboard for a whole new ship design concept that is being used by some of the most advanced exploration vessels in the world, while also leaving the door open for potential yacht and surface warfare designs, is an incredible accomplishment. Yet this humble and unique ship's greatest achievement is the fact that it is so widely despised by the very power that it was built to keep tabs on. Only time will tell if her larger replacement will live up to such a powerful legacy.

Tyler Rogoway is a defense journalist and photographer who maintains the website Foxtrot Alpha for Jalopnik.com You can reach Tyler with story ideas or direct comments regarding this or any other defense topic via the email address Tyler@Jalopnik.com

Cool Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, possessor of truly Jadenesque follower count, acknowledged today that evolution and the Big Bang thoery are real, and that God is not "a magician with a magic wand."

The news, sure to bring joy to the earthly souls of all Catholic churchgoers who also fucking love science, was delivered during a speech at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. From The Independent:

Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they "require it".

"When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so," Francis said.

He added: "He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment.

"The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

Congratulations to His Holiness Frankie for staking out yet another brave, cool position for the Catholic Church. Someday, maybe we'll even get women in the clergy.

[Image via AP]

Tech's biggest players have been clamoring for the federal government to reform their immigration policies, demanding the expansion of the H-1B visa program. But tech's current crop of immigrant workers often find themselves "trapped" by "labor trafficking" rings that are rarely held responsible for abuses.

According to a year-long investigation by The Guardian, NBC Bay Area, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, companies such as Cisco, Google, eBay, Verizon and Apple employ the use of immigrant "body shops." These body shops find young programmers and engineers in India, get them to sign "draconian" contracts, which legally bind them to their employer, send them to work in the United States and withhold portions of their paycheck for profit. And these body shops use the threat of hefty lawsuits to keep immigrants in line.

The extensive use of body shops, described by as NBC as "treating their workers as indentured servants," has been seen as a benefit for major tech companies:

Contracting with labor brokers also benefits US employers. They can staff up swiftly for temporary jobs and slim down just as fast, with workers paid below-market rates. The brokers, meanwhile, deal with immigration regulations and paperwork and generally are on the hook for claims that H-1B worker protection laws were violated.

However, body shops are a nightmare for the immigrant workers. The Guardian reports that "at least $29.7 million" in wages were withheld from immigrants working for US tech firms on H-1B visas. However, this figure is reportedly understated because "bad actors rarely are caught."

These body shops also indenture their workers by forcing them to sign contracts that forbid immigrants from quitting jobs. When immigrant workers do quit their jobs, they are often sued for tens of thousands of dollars.

In at least three of these cases, [body shop] CompSys made workers headed to the US sign bonding agreements requiring them to pay hefty fees if they quit. They had to sign another document once they arrived, agreeing to pay $15,000 more if they quit before the end of their contracts.

"It is an artificial handcuff on workers," said Paul Weiss, a labor attorney in New York who represented workers in some of the CompSys cases. "To impose such a draconian requirement is unconscionable."

Immigrants also complain about being "benched" by their body shops. One worker who spoke to NBC said companies would dump new arrivals in guesthouses, packing workers in small Bay Area apartment and forbidding them to leave the property. These body shops often don't have work for new hires. Instead, they hire immigrants so they'll have workers for future contracts.

However, the worst offense is that H-1B workers are often held captive legally by these body shops. Wipro, a labor trafficking firm with 4,501 H-1B workers that prominently contracts with Apple, has been accused of withholding wages, benefits, and holding visas "hostage":

A [Wipro] representative asked him in one email to sign backdated agreements and return salary he'd already been paid. When Paul refused, he said Wipro withheld pay, benefits and documents he needed to maintain his immigration status – and threatened to hold his visa hostage.

"They wanted to take all my salary," Paul said. "I was forced and coerced."

Paul contacted Apple's corporate offices. He complained that Wipro was violating the company's supplier code of conduct and, he said, Apple officials agreed to look into it. Meanwhile, Wipro continued to withhold $15,000 of his pay and benefits, Paul said.

One Indian immigrant told NBC that the contracts "virtually makes these employees a slave." Another said tech companies profit off an "ecosystem of fear." But Silicon Valley's tech giants have legally isolated themselves from responsibility—and don't show any signs of stopping. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/o...

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Screenshot: NBC Bay Area

Ed Gillespie is the Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia. On Monday Night Football last night, he ran this campaign ad vowing to oppose attempts to make the Washington Redskins change their name.

If your highest priority in voting for a U.S. Senator is "Will protect the racist name of the local sports team," then yes, you are probably a Virginia Republican. This checks out.

[via ThinkProgress]

Scientology is like Saudi Arabia: a bizarrely cloistered theocracy with hundreds of celebrity royals who mention the faith in passing while flitting between gauche resorts and showing off crazy bling. But what does it mean when royals start ditching said bling in a trash heap on L.A.'s Wilshire Boulevard?

One way or another, two super-pricey, hard-to-earn Scientology award plaques for Gay Ribisi ended up in that trash heap this weekend. Ribisi is kind of a big deal in the pseudo-faith's circles: she manages a bunch of Scientologist actors like Jason Lee, and is the mom of acting twins Giovanni and Marissa Ribisi. (Marissa is married to fellow Scientologist Beck.)

@GiovanniRibisi: #GayRibisi's #Scientology "Patron" award found in trash on Wilshire #DownStat? cc: @TonyOrtega9-Look pic.twitter.com/rD4A7DfLuw

— Mark Ebner (@MarkEbner59) October 26, 2014

The ignominious fate of the plaques—which required hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to the Church of Scientology—is all the more bizarre because they were discovered on the street by Mark Ebner, an investigative journalist who has a history with the church, and his wife after a dinner date in L.A. He explained in an email to Gawker:

We were walking it off on Wilshire Boulevard, and the glint of gold off those plaques caught my eye in a pile of detritus that appeared to have been tossed curbside. Lo, the plaques—signifying 50k and 100k donations to Scientology, awarding [Ribisi] "Patron" and Patron With Honors status in the IAS (International Association of Scientologists).

Having been stalked investigated and subjected to Scientology dirty tricks since I wrote my original Spy magazine expose in '96, imagine my delight at finding these artifacts by chance in the big city! Instant karmic retribution. Scientology has been going through my trash for years.

The trash heap was not far from "a grand old building" that some of the Ribisis used to live in, along with Jason Lee and his formerly Scientologist ex-wife Carmen Llewelyn, according to Ebner.

"Could it be possible that Vonni's mother has grown disillusioned with Scientology and is throwing out her treasured artifacts?" asks Scientology-watcher and Raw Story executive editor Tony Ortega. "And wouldn't that cause a major earthquake throughout the Scientology celebrity network?" He quotes a former Scientologist as saying that most devotees would cleave proudly to the cheap tchotchkes. But Ebner has said that if Gay and her clan are still strong in the faith, he's happy to return the plaques to their rightful Operating Thetan.

Just how does a guy with Ebner's history just happened to stumble upon something like this in a trash heap, anyway? "The truth is, after years of battling with the cult, I always win," he says, "because I see them coming before they do."

[ Photo credit: Getty Images]